One day in 1993, a 17-year-old El Paso high school student broke into
his
teacher’s home with a shotgun. He shot and wounded Gudrun Aguirre, a
French and
German teacher, and killed her husband. This was the same student whom
Aguirre
had repeatedly sent to the principal’s office for discipline. Once, the
student
slammed her against a wall at school. The school’s administrators,
however,
continued to return the young man to her classroom. Aguirre told her story in February to legislators considering a
“zero
tolerance” policy on drugs, weapons, violence, and profanity in
schools. Also
present was Jerry Pyle, a teacher and member of the Alliance of Texas
Educators. In three years, Pyle testified, he faced gun-wielding
students six
times. The final incident occurred when he tried to intervene in a rape
attempt
on another student and was beaten at gunpoint.
John Cole, president of the 20,000-member Texas Federation of
Teachers (TFT),
is quick to refer to these stories when discussing his organization’s
zero
tolerance proposal. The TFT has nurtured the policy through two years
of press
conferences, committee hearings, and now, floor votes. Within the next
few
weeks, the Texas Legislature will probably pass an overhauled version
of the
education code, most likely containing some form of zero tolerance. The
Senate
has already approved such a measure, and the House is expected to do so
also.
It will be, according to Cole, the first such policy in the nation, and
hence
the toughest statewide school behavioral code in the U.S.
Zero tolerance is nearly as simple as the slogan itself: Any student
caught
with illegal drugs, and any student who brings a weapon to school or
assaults
someone on school grounds, will be removed from that school. Period.
There is no room in zero tolerance for exceptions, which sounds
reasonable
enough in situations like Pyle and Gudrun’s. But Cole readily admits
that such
situations themselves are exceptional. “That’s not to say that every
other kid
in Texas is carrying a gun to school,” he says. “I think it’s only
something
like one percent.” But that small percentage, he says, has turned some
urban
schools into virtual armed camps, with metal detectors and guards.
TFT’s proposal has widespread support. After years of national
handwringing
over a perceived drug problem in public schools, and after countless
news
reports of shootings, stabbings, and attacks on school grounds, polls
show that
the public overwhelmingly supports more drastic measures to try to
control
violence and substance abuse among teens. A recent survey of Texans by
the TFT
counted 91% of those polled in favor of a zero-tolerance policy.
While Cole says a great number of schools say they already have zero
tolerance
for such offenses – including some in the Austin area (see sidebar) –
few
districts around the state practice what they preach in such a
stringent
manner. He knows of only six – Corpus Christi, San Antonio, El Paso,
Houston,
Victoria, Grand Prairie, and Goose Creek – with zero-tolerance policies
that
measure up to TFT’s standards. Several districts, like AISD, call their
policy
“zero tolerance” but will actually take factors like the student’s past
behavior into consideration when determining what sort of discipline to
use.
At these schools, Mitch Ingram
would probably still be attending classes and getting ready for
graduation. But
last February, Dripping Springs High School officials found the remains
of a
joint in the back of his pickup truck. He was expelled.
Dripping Springs’ policy, in practice, resembles the proposed state
law. The
district has parents and students sign off on a notice declaring the
district’s
objections to drugs and alcohol. Students are told that they will be
held
responsible for items found in their vehicles. Even though there are
seven
possible penalties for violating Dripping Springs’ drug policy –
ranging from
Saturday school and detention period to expulsion – administrators do
not give
second chances when it comes to drugs. “If the offense is serious
enough, the
campus administrators can skip over lesser punishments,” says Tony
Riehl,
superintendent at Dripping Springs. “In the case of possession of
drugs… we
consider that a very serious offense.”
But Ingram doesn’t want a second chance – he wants his name cleared.
Ingram,
until recently a senior at Dripping Springs, was an honors student,
well liked
by other teens. He won the school’s science fair two years in a row,
played
basketball and baseball, and recently placed second in a national
Spanish
contest. Ingram was less than a semester from graduation in February
when
officials found a roach in the ashtray in the back of his pickup truck,
which
was parked on school grounds. He claimed it wasn’t his, and made a
pretty good
case for himself, passing both polygraph and blood tests.
Ingram’s parents, Lisa and Larry, appealed the expulsion to the
Superintendent Riehl, who initially upheld the principal’s decision,
then later
offered Ingram a chance to complete high school in an “alternative
education
program” for kids who have gotten into trouble. The Ingrams turned down
the
proposal, forcing an open meeting of the Dripping Springs School Board
last
month so the community could watch the seven-member board decide on
the
matter.
As 150 people looked on, many wearing pink ribbons in support of
Ingram, his
mother blasted the school district for being inflexible. “All the
things they
tell parents to watch for [regarding drugs], we haven’t seen it. He
comes in
when he says he will, he talks to us, we’ve never smelled anything,”
she says.
“He has good grades, he works weekends at the pizza place, and when
he’s not
working, a lot of times he has his friends over at our house playing
their
instruments and watching movies.
“By the time the school district administration came up with an
alternative
education plan, we had satisfied ourselves of Mitch’s innocence,” she
says. “To
accept an alternative education plan would be to admit that Mitch is
guilty,
which we don’t believe he is.”
It all began on February 24,
1995, when a drug-sniffing dog named “Concho” indicated to his handler
that
there might be something illicit in Ingram’s golden Chevy, double-cab
pickup
truck. Ingram gave the go-ahead to have the truck searched, and the
handler
testified at the school board meeting that he found two wooden pipes, a
pair of
hemostats that appeared to have been used as a roach clip, and the
remains of a
joint in the ashtray behind the driver’s seat. As the testimony
progressed,
things looked bad for Mitch. A gangly teenager with longish, sandy
brown hair,
Ingram spoke quietly and seemed intimidated by the mass of adults
gathered to
determine his fate. He stumbled over his words, and at times needed
help from
his lawyer to get his point across.
But the points were made. The hemostats, Ingram said, were given to
him a day
or two earlier by a friend. The friend, student John Cates, testified
that this
was true. Ingram claimed he clipped them to his visor to hold up a
computer-drawing made for him by his 16-year old brother.
Ingram’s lawyer, Joe Turner, pulled out a plastic grocery bag full
of 20 or 30
wooden pipes belonging to Ingram and a friend, similar to the two
discovered in
the truck. Where did you find these, the lawyer queried. Well, Ingram
said, he
and a friend were cleaning out an old water tank (located near the
school board
president’s property), found the pipes, thought they were neat, and
brought
them home. As for the roach, Ingram said, he has no idea how it got
there. Like
many who live in the small community about 30 minutes west of Austin,
Ingram
doesn’t lock his car, and speculates that someone else must have left
it in
there. His father, a construction worker, actually owns the truck,
though Mitch
drives it most of the time. To try to prove his innocence, Ingram took
a blood
test a couple of days after the truck was searched. At the suggestion
of school
administrators, he also took a polygraph test. He passed both.
“His family has done everything possible to prove that Mitch is
innocent,”
Turner said in a closing statement to the school board. “It’s not a
fair
interpretation of the policy to convict him. There’s nothing wrong with
being
tough. It is wrong to be unfair.”
Strictly speaking, no one questioned that the items were found in
Ingram’s
truck. And under Dripping Springs’ rules – rules that Ingram and his
mother
signed off on – that made him responsible, whether he knew he was
carrying a
joint around or not. In the end, that was enough for the school board.
Ingram
was again offered the chance to finish the year at an alternative
education
program in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District, with
expulsion
his only alternative. This time he accepted. He will be allowed to
participate
in graduation with his class and will begin his freshman year in
college at the
Austin Community College this fall, majoring in international business
with a
minor in Spanish.
Ingram’s mother, however, admonished the school board for disrupting
her son’s
life. She says their family will likely be able to pick up the pieces
of
Mitch’s education and get him to college, but says she fears for other
kids who
may not have such support. She gestured to the people who crowded the
high
school gymnasium for the board meeting, saying “For days I felt like
Mitch’s
future was completely gone. My concern is if this policy continues, the
next
student might not have the support Mitch does, might think that’s the
end of
his future and do something drastic.
“I object to this `let’s not help students, let’s catch students’,”
she
continued. “I do not consider a district that will throw away their
students
like this to be a success.”
But Tony Riehl says that because Dripping Springs does not have big
city
problems of violence and disruption, the district needs a strict policy
to
maintain that atmosphere. It’s that quiet community lifestyle, he says,
which
has the town growing at a steady rate. The high school currently has
about 590
students, and Riehl says the district estimates that number will jump
to 1,000
by the turn of the century. “People move to this area for the quality
of life,
and because of this school district,” he says. “Some of the things
we’re trying
to do in implementing the discipline management plan is to preserve the
very
reason that people move here. Parents want to be assured that there
aren’t
drugs, gangs, and weapons on campus, and that if there are, we’ll do
the best
we can to remove it.”
When confronted with cases like Ingram’s, where it might sound
reasonable
to make an exception to the rules, Cole appeals to common sense. “If
you make
exceptions, everyone thinks that they are the exception… I really
don’t think
you want a policy that says it’s okay to bring marijuana to school
once,” he
says. And as far as punishment goes, he says, expulsion is the only
viable
solution. “You don’t want to take a kid who’s been caught selling drugs
out of
the bathroom and give him in-school suspension, because he still has
access to
the bathroom and his customers.”
Instead, the TFT’s proposal includes a provision requiring districts
to
provide some sort of optional alternative education program for kids
who are
tossed out of school. As it’s currently proposed, about 3,600 kids are
expected
to participate in such a program, estimated to cost $50.4 million
during the
next two years, a figure that the Texas Education Agency (TEA)
requested in its
budget proposal. According to TEA chief of staff Michelle Willhelm, the
agency
expects the state to pitch in the money (see this week’s “On the
Lege”).
Some districts are ahead of the game, with similar programs already
in place.
Until recently, Ingram attended half-day classes along with 26 other
kids at
the newly opened Hays Consolidated ISD Impact Center. According to
principal
Peter Garza, the program employs two full-time teachers, one substitute
teacher, and an aide, and is structured by necessity so the teens can
work at
their own pace. Junior high students attend in the morning, and high
schoolers
in the afternoon. With such an age span, “the students come from
different
[academic], levels, so you might have an English class with freshmen
and
seniors,” Garza says.
The fledgling program cost about $150,000 to run this year, according
to the
district’s business office. The curriculum is modest: basic English,
math,
science and history, a change of pace for Ingram, who was enrolled in
senior-level English, physics, economics, and theater classes before
this all
happened. He was able to finish school through the Impact Center in six
days,
completing the program last week.
At Dripping Springs, “he was in a peer tutoring program, where he
tutored a
kid for one period a day who couldn’t speak English,” Ingram’s mother
says. ”
He lost the tutoring job, and couldn’t keep up in physics or theater.
We really
feel like he paid academically.” While Ingram was hoping to go to the
University of Texas this fall, he now plans to start out at the ACC.
“Our
lawyer told us we could still do it [sue] because we feel our due
process was
violated… but Mitch is tired of being the center of attention. He
feels like
he put the facts out there and cleared his name in public.”
Cole says the current problems with drugs and violence in schools have been evolving over
decades, coming
in part out of a changing desire to keep kids in school, and partly out
of a
bureaucratic maneuvering. “During the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties,
getting a
high school education was a nice thing, but not necessarily a given.
You didn’t
need to know higher level physics to be a roughneck and make good money
at it.
So a lot of people dropped out of school early,” he says. “During the
Sixties
and Seventies, when schools were… deciding to incorporate everybody,
the
whole attitude changed from `if you don’t like it here you’re out,’ to
`let’s
see what we can do to encourage kids to stay.’ But in the zeal to
encourage
kids to stay, the prime directive became `keep this kid in school
regardless of
any other circumstances’.”
At the same time, Cole says, schools began losing their dress codes,
relaxing
rules on things like swearing and insubordination. “Eventually, we’ve
reached
the point where now teachers are told they have to put up with being
assaulted
and beaten up,” he says. “That’s where the system breaks down and
that’s where
we’re at with many schools in this state right now.”
Cole also blames bureaucrats whose instincts are to “push off onto
somebody
else unpleasant things, to keep themselves out of the heat. Many of our
school
bureaucrats felt that if there was an incident at school, it’s a bad
public
relations incident and they dealt with it as a public relations
problem, not as
a problem with school violence,” he says. “So if a principal called the
police
over a fight or over students with drugs or guns, you’d get someone
from
downtown calling and saying, `this is terrible, We’ve got our name in
the paper
and it’s not on the sports page. Can’t you do something about this?’ So
it got
out there, don’t let these things get known.”
Interestingly, Cole is not one to rail against the evils of
marijuana. He
raises the question of whether society has a legitimate interest in
people who
smoke pot. “Is the debate about the propriety of marijuana still an
active one?
Most of my contemporaries would have said marijuana is at least as
harmless as
alcohol; of course, the response to that is, well that’s not very
harmless,” he
says. Cole sidestepped the question, instead comparing school to the
workplace.
“Drugs are of course illegal, I guess, the ones we’re talking
about. There
is that. So we should be teaching that the law has to be followed. But
it would
not make any difference if you’re talking about alcohol, marijuana, or
cocaine.
The lesson is, you don’t come drunk to your workplace. If you do that
when you
graduate from school you are going to be fired,” he says. “That lesson
needs to
be communicated to students, and if we don’t communicate it, the other
message
we communicate is a bad one, which is, yeah, it’s okay to come to
school and
bring these things. It establishes a pattern of behavior.”
Cole is hesitant to say that school districts have any business
searching a
student’s vehicle. But while he is not familiar with the details of
Ingram’s
case, he agrees that if the senior knew he was to be responsible for
anything
found in his truck, then Ingram should be punished.
“But the bigger problem isn’t the kid with a marijuana cigarette in
his car;
it’s students who are disrupting other students’ right to an
education,” he
says. And as far as Ingram goes, and any others like him: “He knew what
was
expected. It’s one of the lessons in life, you have to learn sometimes
that
there are consequences for your actions.”
This article appears in May 12 • 1995 and May 12 • 1995 (Cover).